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Model driven agent based simulation development
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Santos, Fernando Dos |
| Copyright Year | 2019 |
| Abstract | The Agent-based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) paradigm has been used to analyze, reproduce, and predict phenomena in many application areas, such as traffic and epidemiology. Building agent-based simulations is a challenging task that often demands technical expertise in ABMS and its simulation platforms. Researchers have already argued about the importance of tools and building blocks that increase the abstraction level and therefore reduce the effort in agent-based simulation development. Model-driven Development (MDD) is an approach for software development, in which high-level modeling artifacts drive the production of effort-consuming low-level artifacts, such as the source code. Previous studies on the use of MDD in mainstream software development have already shown that it significantly increases productivity. However, in the ABMS paradigm MDD has been exploited in a limited way. Most of the existing proposals consider modeling and code generation of limited simulation aspects, leaving much left to be implemented by developers. Nevertheless, there is a lack of empirical studies that demonstrate whether these MDD approaches are indeed effective. In this thesis, we exploit MDD in the context of ABMS. We propose MDD4ABMS, a model-driven approach for developing agent-based simulations. MDD4ABMS is composed of the following elements, which are the main contributions of this thesis: (i) a metamodel for agent-based simulations that was built following a bottom-up approach to abstract aspects recurrently used in simulations and make them available for modeling; (ii) a domain-specific modeling language with building blocks to instantiate agent-based simulation models; and (iii) model-to-code transformations to generate source code for NetLogo, a widely used agent-based simulation platform. While abstractions provided by the metamodel allow developers to focus on which features to consider in simulations instead of how to implement and integrate them (a task that may introduce inconsistencies in simulations), building blocks provided by the modeling language promote expressive modeling. Empirical studies showed that MDD4ABMS reduces the development effort in comparison to NetLogo, and meets qualitative aspects related to the user experience, such as ease of comprehension and usability. These results give evidence of the benefits that MDD4ABMS provide to ABMS. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.lume.ufrgs.br/bitstream/handle/10183/193521/001089540.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=1 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
